Republican Rep. Katy Hall had a bill signed into law this year that made sweeping changes to Utah’s adoption code. But it didn’t just happen. She started working on it a year before the 2026 legislative session and described it as a “labour of love” with many late nights and weekends spent refining and researching the issue.
Utah lawmakers are prolific bill writers. This year a record 1,015 were proposed, and 540 of those actually made it through the political obstacle course they needed to pass.
Behind the avalanche of proposals is a slower process of drafting, negotiation and revision. Many ideas stall, and even bills that pass often return for more amendments. Even though the session wrapped up just last month, lawmakers are already laying the foundation for 2027 and looking to constituents to help guide what comes next.
Democratic Sen. Stephanie Pitcher represents Utah’s 14th senate district. She said some of the bigger bills she passed in 2026 started almost a year before the session began.
“The sooner we can start talking about policy and conceptualizing an idea and turning that into a bill, the better,” she said.
The process is pretty simple. Generally a lawmaker comes across an issue either from a constituent or in their civilian career – in Pitcher’s case, she’s a former prosecutor turned criminal defense attorney. The capitol has staff who work as policy analysts and draft bills for interim committees. This is where Pitcher said things begin to take shape.
But even if fully fleshed out bills make it all the way to the finish line and are implemented, that doesn’t mean things are set in stone. In some cases, like the 2025 bill banning collective bargaining for public sector unions, the public can band together and repeal it, effectively throwing it out. Bills can also get brought back and amended for issues that were missed the first time around.
Pitcher said this is normal and explained one of the new laws she wrote this year was a “follow up” from a policy she passed in 2025. The original law allowed counties to impose civil penalties for individuals who were “skirting” the vehicle emissions testing process. After it was implemented though, she found people were paying the penalty but still not getting their vehicle emissions tested.
“So this year, I ran a bill that also allows the DMV to revoke the registration of that vehicle so it can't be on the road until the underlying emissions testing is cured,” she said.
To get that bill introduced and then passed, Pitcher reached across the aisle to a Republican colleague, “who understood that this is an important issue,” and they worked on it together.
Despite the ever-growing divide between Republicans and Democrats at the national level, Pitcher emphasized that Utah lawmakers work together. Part of that, she acknowledged, is due to the state’s Republican supermajority.
“As a Democrat, we have to have Republicans on board, buying in and investing into our ideas and our policies,” she said, adding that good relationships are crucial to getting a bill passed.
That spirit of relationship-building and long-term policy work also shaped one of the session’s most significant reforms.
The drive behind Hall’s big ticket adoption reform bill that was signed into law this year began with a constituent. They came to Hall early last year with several allegations of transactional-style adoptions taking place at the hospital where they worked.
Hall’s process mirrored that of Pitcher’s. She worked with capitol staff to draft the bill and then engaged in numerous interim meetings, making tweaks and changes to it at every step until it landed on Gov. Spencer Cox’s desk.
Hall said although her law went a long way in repairing Utah’s reputation for lax adoption laws, she thinks “there probably will be” more to revisit in future sessions – underscoring that even major laws are often adjusted after they take effect.
“We'll have to see, is it accomplishing what we think it was going to accomplish over the next, you know, the six months?” she said, “And if not, then yeah, there we could probably open a bill file in November, December, and say, oh, you know what? This is still an issue.”
At the end of the day, some bills just aren’t ready to pass. Republican Rep. Doug Fiefia said he traveled across the country — and overseas — to work on his AI transparency bill for the 2026 legislative session. It ultimately stalled after the White House sent Utah lawmakers a memo calling it “unfixable.”
“I think that this is probably something we will continue to talk about not only as a state, but also throughout the country — you have other states that are running very similar bills, and so I don't think that this conversation ends here,” he said.
Hall and Pitcher explained failed bills are part of being a legislator. When it happens it’s usually because things need to be further refined, or it could be as simple as a budgeting issue. Both said it doesn't mean a bill is dead, it just means they have to head back to the drawing board.
Legislators can start filing their 2027 bills on May 6, 2026.
